Mrs Shorrocks

All of these stories serve to remind us that sadly, the Internet can endanger, as well as enrich, the lives of our children.

All ICT lessons this week have been given over specifically to e- safety and responding to the concerns about what we are hearing in the news. Older pupils are discussing the pitfalls of sexting and, indeed, posting any photo that might be compromising. This is particularly relevant given the Snapchat news which has underlined the fact that once your photos go online it is very hard to control what happens to them or who can see them. Other pupils are learning that it is not safe to assume that you know who you are talking to online and therefore you should never meet up with somebody you only know through online communications. Our new pupils are learning the SMART rules which still offer good sensible guidance on what to do or not to do online.

The girls are bringing home the latest edition of the Digital Parenting magazine to help reinforce these messages. Please take a look through the magazine; it is full of really useful advice.

Of course if you have any concerns about how to help your daughter or ward stay safe online please contact me at school.

Mrs Shorrocks

If you want to follow up on some of the news items, please try these links:

Last Monday Post-16 girls set off in a minibus and 2 cars with 2 wheelchairs and plenty of food. On arrival at Willow Tree, their home for 3 days, they had a tour and settled into their new surroundings.

That evening they made Italian food and the girls enjoyed an evening of loom bands, face masks and nail painting.

On Tuesday they had a late breakfast, packed up some sandwiches and set off on a walk through the woods to the beach at Ruislip Lido. After lunch, paddling and ice creams they set off to walk back. However, they didn’t seem to take the most direct route back through the woods and ended up trekking through mud!!

Later, after a roast dinner they ended Tuesday with a camp fire and marshmallow smores!

On Wednesday it was sadly time to pack up before enjoying the last of the sunshine.

Alfriston’s Student Council is supporting the Send ALL My Friends to School campaign to remind world leaders that it is children with disabilities that are missing out most on their right to an education.

In 2000 world leaders promised universal primary education by 2015, but with only a year to go 57 million children are still out of school and over a third of them have a disability.

To support Send ALL My Friends to School, we will be asking pupils to make chains of colourful ‘buddy’ figures to represent the estimated 24 million children with disabilities that are missing out on school.

Ade Adepitan, broadcaster and Paralympian is supporting the 2014 campaign, which aims to have thousands of schools taking part.

Ade presents the campaign film which links to his own story.

Ade says: “If world leaders are serious about getting EVERY child into education, they must prioritise the needs of children with disabilities now.”

Ade was born in Nigeria where he contracted polio at 15 months old. Ade moved to London before he started primary school but knows that if he had stayed in Nigeria his life would have been very different. Nigeria is the country with the largest number of out of school children, currently at over 10 million and is of course in the News right now after 100s of girls were taken from their school.

Alfriston School has been awarded a Gold Democracy Award by UK Youth Parliament. This has come about because we achieved 88% participation in the 2013/14 Buckinghamshire Youth Parliament Elections. The presentation event will be held on June 10th.

Our pupils voted in the South Bucks and Chiltern constituency where the following young people were appointed:

MYP Faiyaz Amin

Deputy MYP Kate Jameson

Deputy MYP Becky Mohr

We also took great interest in what happened in the Wycombe constituency where our very own Laura Gonsalves was a candidate. She received a fantastic 1824 votes and was duly confirmed as a Deputy MYP.

The new MYPs will continue working at a local level and will also attend district and regional meetings. We are looking forward to a visit from Faiyaz in the coming weeks.

We have already started thinking about Safer Internet Day in school and pastoral groups are discussing what they can do to make the Internet even better than it already is. Our Monday assembly focused on this and some rules for staying safe on the Internet.

The day itself offers the opportunity to focus on both the creative things that children and young people are doing online, as well as the role and responsibility that all stakeholders have in helping to create a better internet and that includes you!

Parents and carers play a key role in supporting children to learn about how to stay safe online, and they are one of the first people children turn to if things go wrong. But it can be difficult to stay on top of the wide range of sites and devices that young people use, so why not take a look at the really useful advice from the SID website:

Talk to your child about their favourite websites. Starting a conversation on a positive foot can lead nicely into a chat about online safety.

If your child loves to use social networking sites, teach them about protecting their personal information by thinking about what they are sharing and who they are sharing it with. Show them how to use privacy settings, and how to block and report – and advise them to only accept friend requests from people they know in real life.

Remind your child that showing respect for others online is just as important as showing it offline. Encourage them to think before they post and encourage them to show positive behaviour online.

There are lots of ways you can advise your child about cyberbullying, if they are worried remind them to save the evidence and to always tell an adult they trust if something upsets them online.

There are ways in which you can help to prevent your child from seeing inappropriate content online. Have you considered parental controls and filtering in your home and also on your children’s portable internet enabled devices?

Additionally, SIDtv will be streamed live from the website on Safer Internet Day. Tune in to the parents’ hour at 3pm or 7pm.

Your daughter will be asked to talk to you about making the internet better and she will be bringing home some conversation starters to get the ball rolling. Please let us know how your conversations go.

The United Kingdom Youth Parliament (UKYP) gives the young people of the UK between the ages of 11 and 18 a voice. A voice heard and listened to by local and national government, providers of services for young people and other agencies with an interest in the views and needs of young people.

UKYP has over 400 elected members of youth parliament (MYPs) and deputy members (DMYPs) who represent young people throughout the UK and elections are going on right now. Amber and Sam explained the voting process to some of our girls and now some of our Y11 pupils are going to work with the rest of the school to make sure everyone gets a chance to vote.

Since Alfriston is in Beaconsfield, we are eligible to vote for candidates in Chiltern and South Bucks and we will be looking at the manifesto videos for those 3 candidates. However, our very own Laura Gonsalves is standing as a candidate in Wycombe and we really hope that she is elected even if we can’t vote for her!

If you have family or friends who go to school in the Wycombe area please tell them about Laura and hopefully they might decide to vote for her.

Having been one of the winners in the ‘Name a Gritter’ competition run by Transport for Buckinghamshire (tfb) back in 2011/12, we were offered the chance to have a gritter visit our school so that our pupils could see one of the vehicles that helps keeps our roads safe during the winter months.

So it was that “Alfie the Grit” arrived at Alfriston one wet afternoon this week. Three members of staff accomapnied the vehicle and they were pleased to talk to the girls about how the vehicle works and what they do. Several classes were able to look over the truck and check out inside the cab. The girls enjoyed this opportunity and Connie Sellers took a particular interest, asking lots of questions. She discovered that this sort of truck takes two years to make and costs £250 000.00! We also learned that Alfie is one of the newest shiniest trucks in the fleet and is deployed to clear major routes and motorways.

It is possible to follow the progress of the trucks on the tfb website and we were able to track Alfie leaving Beaconsfield on the interactive map. Next time the weather turns wintry, you could look to see where Alfie is working:

We arrived at 9.00 at Wycombe Abbey Children’s Centre and we had to sign in and take a name badge.

Soon the parents arrived and sat down to enjoy tea and toast and chat to each other. Their children went off happily to play with the toys that were out for them. We were just observing and learning about what goes on.

After a while we joined in with the children and we led activities like play dough and sticking and glueing. The children were lovely and we really enjoyed working with them. Some of them were a bit shy to begin with but they got used to us as the day went on. Others were excited to see us right from the start! One little boy, James, wanted us to play with his truck.

At lunchtime the parents and children went home and we spent some time clearing up all the mess. You can’t believe how much mess 16 little children can make!!! The play dough seemed to get everywhere. When it was all tidy, we sat down for lunch with the staff and got to know them a bit better.

Soon another group of parents arrived with babies this time- under 6 months. We chatted to the mums and played with the babies. They cried a lot and we tried our hardest to keep them happy and quiet.

A lady called Rachel led a session on how to calm the babies using music. This session was called Baby Beats. The music was on her ipod and it seemed quite effective as most of the babies went quiet. She also helped the parents to relax by focusing on positive thoughts. We found her ideas very interesting and useful.

When the mothers and babies had left we were able to talk to Rachel and help her tidy up. Before we left, we had a cup of tea with Debbie and Kate and Mel and wrote up our feedback for the day. We felt that it had been a really positive experience. Debbie and Kate were very complimentary to us and said we would be very welcome to come back for work experience.

We received a certificate and then it was time to go home and recover from our busy day!

The pupils who have chosen to take part will look round your home to see what appliances are left on even though they are not being used. They will identify which members of the household are responsible and monitor their actions over 5 days. They have a form to record their findings.

Hopefully parents and carers will get involved and ideally discuss what the family can do to save energy in the home. If you want to take it seriously you can create a family pledge on The Pod website to be in with a chance of winning a super prize.

If you are a driver you will know how difficult it is to spot the pedestrian who nips across the road in front of you dressed in dark colours from head to foot. Therefore the Student Council ran an assembly to raise awareness amongst pupils and staff. Pupils were encouraged to wear something bright on their coats or bags and staff were asked to drive carefully and keep an eye out for pedestrians and cyclists. Free reflective stickers were offered to pupils visiting the Student Council Shop.

More generally the campaign this year was focused on calling on everyone, but especially drivers, to tune in to road safety, to avoid the devastating crashes that are caused by multi-tasking.

A lot of us are pretty attached to our smartphones these days, so distraction is no longer just about making a call. We’ve entered a new era where being constantly connected is the norm and some people find it hard to switch off even for a minute. Driving is the most risky thing most of us do regularly. It’s highly unpredictable, so you need your head on the job. Yet it’s easy to forget the risks, and many drivers think they can get away with multi-tasking.

The truth is none of us are good at doing two things at once. It’s a proven fact that if you try to multi-task at the wheel you’re putting yourself and others in real danger.

So drivers, why not turn off your phones, or better still, stick them in the boot, and never attempt to do anything at the wheel other than the critical task at hand: DRIVING.